walked down a long
corridor and raped an iron door across stone.
In her dream she
saw
herself rise from the bed and kneel on the floor and lift her hair off
her neck and lay her head down on the mattress, for some reason no
longer afraid. Then the year became 1845 and the place was not
Louisiana but Paris, and a great crowd filled the plaza below the
platform she knelt on, their faces dirty, their bodies and wine-soaked
breaths emanating a collective stench that was like sewer gas in the
bordello district in the early hours. The sun was bright above the
buildings and the shadow of the guillotine spilled across the
cobblestones and the rim of the crowd, who were throwing rotted produce
at her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a muscular, black-hooded
man ease the top half of the wood stock down on her neck and lock it
into place, then step back with a lanyard in his hand.
A man in a beaver hat and
split-tail coat raised his hand and the crowd fell silent and Carrie
could hear the wind blowing through the portals that led into the plaza
and leaves scratching across stone. The light seemed to harden and grow
cold, and she felt a sensation like a ribbon of ice water slice across
the back of her neck. Then the headsman jerked the lanyard and she
heard the trigger spring loose at the top of the scaffold and the sound
of a great metal weight whistling down upon her.
The plaza and the upturned,
dirt-smeared faces in it and the stone buildings framed against the sky
toppled away from her like an oil painting tossed end-over-end into a
wicker basket.
When a black man came to work
at the bordello in the morning, he found the back door broken open and
Carrie LaRose kneeling by the side of her bed, the pillow that had been
used to suffocate her still covering her head. A white camellia lay on
the floor.
WEEK later the sheriff sent
word to Flower that he wanted to see her in his office. She put on her
best dress and opened a parasol over her head and walked down Main to
the jail. She had never been to the jail before, and she paused in
front of the door and looked automatically at the ground to see if
there were paths that led to side entrances for colored. The sheriff,
Hipolyte Gautreau, saw her through the window and waved her inside.
"How you do, Miss Flower? Come
in and have a seat. I'll run you t'rew this fast as I can so you can
get back to your school," he said.
She did not understand his
solicitousness or the fact he had addressed her as Miss. She folded her
parasol and sat down in a chair that was placed closely against the
side of his desk.
He fitted on his spectacles
and removed a single sheet of paper from a brown envelope and unfolded
it in both hands.
"You knew Carrie LaRose pretty
good, huh?" he said.
"I did her laundry and cleaned
house for her," Flower replied.
"A month befo' she died"
"She didn't die. She was
murdered."
The sheriff nodded. "Last
month she had this will wrote up. She left you her house and one
hundred dol'ars. The money is at the bank in your name. I'll walk you
down to the courthouse to transfer the deed."
"Suh?" she said.
"There's fifty arpents that go
wit' the house. A cane farmer works it on shares. It's all yours, Miss
Flower."
She sat perfectly still, her
face without expression, her hands resting on top of her folded
parasol. She gazed through the doorway that gave on to the cells. They
were empty, except for a town drunkard, who slept in a fetal position
on the floor. The sheriff looked over his shoulder at the cells.
"Somet'ing wrong?" he said.
"Nobody is locked up for
killing Miss Carrie."
"She knew a lot of bad t'ings
about lots of people," he said. He seemed to study his own words, his
expression growing solemn and profound with their implication.
"She gave Miss Abby the money
to buy our school. That's why she's dead," Flower said.
But the sheriff was shaking
his head even before she had finished her statement.
"I wouldn't say that, Miss
Flower. There's lots of people had it in for Carrie LaRose. Lots of"
"There was a white camellia by
her foot. Everybody knows what the white camellia means."
"Miss Carrie had camellias
growing in her side yard. It don't mean a__"
"Shame on the people who
claimed to be her friend. Shame on every one of them. You don't need to
be helping me transfer the deed, either," Flower said. She looked the
sheriff in the eyes, then rose from her chair and walked out the door.
She used the one hundred
dollars to buy books for the school and to hire carpenters and painters
to refurbish her new house. She and Abigail dug flower beds around the
four sides of the house, spading the clay out of the subsoil so that
each bed
was like an elongated ceramic tray. They
hauled black dirt from the cane fields and mixed it in the wagon with
sheep manure an
d
humus from the swamp, then filled the beds with it and planted roses,
hibiscus, azalea bushes, windmill palms, hydrangeas and banana trees
all around the house.
On the evening the painters
finished the last of the trim, Flower and Abigail sat on a blanket
under the live oak in back and drank lemonade and ate fried chicken
from a basket and looked at the perfect glow and symmetry of the house
in the sunset. Flower's belongings were piled in Abigail's buggy,
waiting to be moved inside.
"I cain't believe all this is
happening to me, Miss Abby," Flower said.
"You're a lady of property.
One of these days you'll have to stop calling me 'Miss Abby,'" Abigail
said.
"Not likely," Flower said.
"You're a dear soul. You
deserve every good thing in the world. You don't know how much you mean
to me."
"Miss Abby, sometime you make
me a little uncomfortable, the way you talk to me."
"I wasn't aware of that,"
Abigail replied, her face coloring.
"I'm just fussy today," Flower
said.
"I'll try to be a bit more
sensitive," Abigail said.
"I didn't mean to hurt your
feelings, Miss Abby. Come on now," she said, patting the top of
Abigail's hand.
But Abigail removed her hand
and began putting her food back in the picnic basket.
THE next morning Flower woke
in the feather-stuffed bed that had belonged to Carrie LaRose. The wind
was cool through the windows, the early sunlight flecked with rain.
During the night she had heard horses on the road and loud voices from
the saloon next door, perhaps those of night riders whose reputation
was spreading through the countryside, but she kept the .36 caliber
revolver from McCain's Hardware under her bed, five chambers loaded,
with fresh percussion caps on each of the nipples. She did not believe
the Knights of the White Camellia or the members of the White League
were the ghosts of dead Confederate
soldiers. In fact, she
believed they were moral and physical
cowards who hid their
failure under bedsheets and she fantasized that one day the men who had
attacked her would return, garbed in hoods and robes, and she would
have the chance to do something unspeakable and painful to each of them.
Through her open window she
could hear a piece of paper flapping. She got up from the bed and
walked barefoot to the front door and opened it. Tied to the door
handle with a piece of wire were a thin, rolled newspaper printed with
garish headlines and a note written on a piece of hand-soiled butcher
paper.
The note read:
Dear Nigger,
Glad you can read. See what
you think about the article on you and
the Yankee bitch who thinks
her shit don't stink.
It was unsigned.
The newspaper was printed on
low-grade paper, of a dirty gray color, the printer's type undefined
and fuzzy along the edges. The newspaper was titled
The Rebel
Clarion
and had sprung to life in Baton Rouge immediately after
the Surrender, featuring anonymously written articles and cartoons that
depicted Africans with slat teeth, jug ears, lips that protruded like
suction cups and bodies with the anatomical proportions of baboons, the
knees and elbows punching through the clothes, as though poverty were
in itself funny. In the cartoons the emancipated slave spit watermelon
seeds, tap-danced while a carpetbagger tossed coins at him, sat with
his bare feet on a desk in the state legislature or with a mob of his
peers chased a terrified white woman in bonnet and hooped skirts inside
the door of a ruined plantation house.
The article Flower was
supposed to read was circled with black charcoal. In her mind's eye she
saw herself tearing both the note and the newspaper in half and
dropping them in the trash pit behind the house. But when she saw
Abigail's name in the first paragraph of the article she sat down in
Carrie LaRose's rocker on the gallery and, like a person deciding to
glance at the lewd writing on a privy wall, she began to read.
While Southern
soldiers died
on the field at Shiloh, Miss Dowling
showed her loyalties by joining ranks with the
Beast of New Orleans, General Benjamin Butler, and
caring for the enemy during the Yankee occupation of that city.
Later, using a pass from the
Sanitary Commission, she smuggled escaped negroes through Confederate
lines so they could join the Yankee army and sack the homes of their
former owners and benefactors and, in some cases, rape the white women
who had clothed and fed and nursed them when they were sick.
Miss Dowling has now seen fit
to use her influence in the Northern press to attack one of Louisiana's
greatest Confederate heroes, a patriot who was struck by enemy fire
three times at Shiloh but who managed to escape from a prison hospital
and once more join in the fight to support the Holy Cause.
Miss Dowling is well known in
New Iberia, not only for her traitorous history during the war but also
for propensities that appear directly related to her spinsterhood.
Several credible sources have indicated that her close relationship
with a freed negro woman is best described by a certain Latin term this
newspaper does not make use of.
She set both the note and the
newspaper under a flowerpot, although she could not explain why she
didn't simply throw them away, and went inside her new house and fixed
breakfast.
SEVERAL hours later a
carriage
with waxed black surfaces and white wheels and maroon cushions and a
surrey on top pulled into the yard. A black man in a tattered, brushed
coat and pants cut off at the knees sat in the driver's seat. A lean,
slack-jawed outrider, wearing a flop hat, a gunbelt and holstered
revolver hanging from his pommel, preceded the carriage into the yard
and dismounted and looked back down the road and out into the fields,
as though the great vacant spaces proffered a threat that no one else
saw.
Flower stepped out on the
gallery, into the hot wind blowing from the south. Ira Jamison got down
from his carriage and removed his hat and wiped the inside of the band
with a handkerchief as he nodded approvingly at the house and the
mixture of flowers and banana trees and palms planted around it.
He wore a white shirt with
puffed sleeves and a silver vest and dark pants, but because of the
heat his coat was folded neatly on the cushions of the carriage. He
carried an ebony-black cane with a gold head on it, but Flower
noticed his limp was gone and his
skin was
pink and
his eyes bright.
"This is extraordinary. You've
done a wonderful job with the old place," he said. "My heavens, you
never cease proving you're one of the most ingenious women I've ever
known."
She looked at him mutely, her
face tingling.
"Aren't you going to say
hello?" he asked.
"How do you do, Colonel?" she
said.
"Smashing, as my British
friends in the cotton trade say. I'm in town to check on a few business
matters. Looks like the Yanks burned down my laundry and the cabins out
back with it."
"I'm glad you brought that up.
My fifty arpents runs into seventy-five of yours. I'll take them off
your hands," she said.
"You'll take them off" he
began, then burst out laughing. "Now, how would you do that?"
"Use my house and land to
borrow the money. I already talked to the bank."
"Will you pay me for the
buildings I lost?"
"No."
"By God, you amaze me, Flower.
I'm proud of you," he said.
She felt her heart quicken,
and was ashamed at how easily he could manipulate her emotions. She
walked down the steps, then tilted up the flowerpot she had stuck the
racist newspaper under.
"Read this and the note that
came with it," she said.
Jamison set down his cane on
the steps and unfolded the newspaper in the shade. Behind him, the
outrider, whom Flower recognized as Clay Hatcher, stood in the sun,
sweating under his hat. His bottom lip was swollen and crusted with
black blood along a deep cut. He kept swiping horseflies out of his
face.